Thread of Wonder, the next 5000 posts: science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction 2021 and beyond

I really, really enjoyed The Malazan Book of the Fallen. The final, tenth volume misses a little bit, but it's a hard landing to stick and the series is still very much worth it.

I'm not nearly familiar with fantasy as with science fiction, but xpost Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien is a good, fun grounding: stories that T. commented on, others that he was known to have read, probably read, coulda read, couldn't have read for various reasons, but they all pertain to what he did/have some related appeal. Also the DG Hartwell-edited Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, which goes from at least the 18th Century to the 1980s, to Le Guin, at least. Another good gateway for me was one of the anthologies that George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois commissioned from leading modern authors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_These_Strange_Streets---it's tagged as "urban fantasy," but yes, some very strange streets, not nearly all of which go where I thought they might (likewise Ellen Datlow's Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy).
Martin & D's Dangerous Women is maybe even better, but/because it crosses genre and subgenre lines. Their Rogues is also good, but I miss Jack Vance's characters---all stories in these have to be new, and RIP Vance can't dance no more, being dead So maybe try his The Complete Dying Earth, or whatever you can find in the DE saga starring Cugel the Cunning (I don't know that much Vance otherwise).
I also liked this Fritz Leiber [series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafhrd_and_the_Gray_Mouser"> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafhrd_and_the_Gray_Mouser
Patricia McKillip's Winter Rose and Naomi Novik's Uprooted are compatible, deep in forest worlds.

I read the first Elric trilogy too soon after five books of Dying Earth, should have taken a break from series; also, it seemed dry by comparison, but a lot of things would. Most of the Moorcock stories I've come across in antholgies were good (and non-series-related, far as I know).

Vance reminds of Philip K Dick (at least from what I’ve read of both) in the way his short stories take off into unexpected tangents. But Vance is a better sentence writer, more controlled, less chaotic (for better and worse)

PBKR - looking for D&D Appendix N style stories?
After New Sun you going for Urth, Long Sun and Short Sun?

I've been buying up Lavie Tidhar's World SF anthologies (including the Apex series) and Valancourt's World Horror anthologies and can't wait to start on them. Listened to another Lavie interview recently and he talked about some reviewers still baulking at names of foreign places as if everything should be set in new york and london. He met an editor like this too!

Thanks for the tip on Celtic Weird. Mains has been digging up things in recent anthologies.

Yes, Appendix N was what I was referencing without saying it. I've read Urth too, but don't know if I need to read further just yet.

Here's an anthology I've been wanting because David Madison stories are really difficult to find
http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/appendix-n/

As far as sword and sorcery these two seem good but a chunk of it is the expected characters
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1433129
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?603384

There's been quite a big (albeit small press) resurgence of sword and sorcery and sword and planet recently. I was hesitant to join a discord a while ago because the genre has a bit of a reputation for nostalgic reactionaries but I needn't have worried.

Love the Pyat covers
https://pmpress.org.uk/product-tag/michael-moorcock/

One of the elements in my story ‘Mad Lutanist’ (recently reprinted in The Ghost & Scholars Book of Follies and Grottoes edited by Rosemary Pardoe, from Sarob Press) is the aeolian harp, an ancient instrument which resonates with the wind to produce eerie music. It fascinated Coleridge, and his experiments and speculations are alluded to in the story.

I was therefore delighted to receive news of Aeolian Mixtape by Quinta, an album just released on the always-interesting Nonclassical label. Quinta is a London-based experimental composer who devised hand-made versions of the aeolian harp while she was living in Greece. Its strange soaring sounds are here combined with string instruments and electronics to convey a truly unearthly soundscape.

(Mark Valentine)

I'm reading Marge Piercy's He She and It and finding it tough going. Maybe I'm just not in the mood, it's clearly very rich and thoughtful, and very feminist, but I have no interest in the sexual hangups of the main character, or of reading the same story twice. (It's a retelling of the Golem of Prague set in a post collapse world, interleaved with a retelling of the same story in its original setting but modified to develop parallels with the other version.)

all my christmases sf library reservations have come at once, I need to finish marge piercy so I can get on with alistair reynolds' eversion (thankfully under 300 pages) and emily st john mandell's sea of tranquility.

i have lost touch of reynolds books, haven't even heard of that one.

description makes me think of Century Rain, which was a nice standalone thing he did way back when.

i was keeping up with Reynolds for awhile and also lost touch. he never really disappointed, though the first one i read ('house of suns') remains my favorite.

separately, my kid is very much into Tolkien and seems inclined to find more along those lines. so far, he's been digging into the redwall books pretty steadily. i also showed him the back-of-the-book description of 'the sword of shannara' (as a goof!) and he had a good laugh over its transparent thievery from lotr.

Maybe he'd like Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry? I just finished it last night (pretty sure I read the first volume as a Tolkien-obsessed kid), and it clearly has a large debt to Tolkien. Kay worked on The Silmarillion with Christopher Tolkien, and you can see a lot of the same mythical elements at play. I found it beautiful in some ways, but also ultimately unsatisfying - by the end there's probably 50+ characters, gods, demons, etc. vying for attention, and I don't think GGK really keeps control of all the different forces in the last volume. But it does give you a rich fantasy world, which is half the reason I read this kind of book.

He might like the old Dragonlance novels!

The Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander are good, especially if your kid is on the younger side.

those suggestions sound good! Like me he has a backlog of unread books he owns plus plenty of library books. It’s not an insurmountable problem to have though, he’s a fast reader.

Prydian? That’s Welsh for Britain, isn’t it.

Lloyd Alexander repurposes a bunch of Welsh myths for the series.

i read 'sword of shannara' well before lord of the rings; when i finally read the latter i was like holy shit brooks just . . . changed the directions on the map

would also recommend susan cooper's dark is rising series

lol same

Some time later, the last Druid Allanon arrives in Shady Vale. Allanon warns the Ohmsford brothers that the Warlock Lord has returned to the Skull Kingdom in the Northland and is coming for Shea. As the last descendant of Jerle Shannara, Shea is the only one capable of wielding the Sword of Shannara against the Warlock Lord.

Allanon departs, leaving Shea three Blue Elfstones for protection. He tells Shea to flee at the sign of the Skull. A few weeks later, a creature bearing a symbol of a skull shows up: a Skull Bearer, one of the Warlock Lord's "winged black destroyers",[3] has arrived to search for Shea. The brothers are forced to flee with the Skull Bearer on their heels. They take refuge in the nearby city of Leah where they find Shea's friend Menion, the son of the city's lord. Menion decides to accompany the two, and he travels with them to Culhaven, to meet with Allanon. While at Culhaven, they are joined by a prince of Callahorn, Balinor Buckhannah, two elven brothers, Durin and Dayel Elessedil, and the dwarf Hendel.

Hmm

What’s a good wynne jones book to start with?

Buying for a relative but also want to try one myself

What’s a good wynne jones book to start with?

Buying for a relative but also want to try one myself

(The relative being a 13 year old)

Golden Age + 1

Re: Dianne Wynne Jones, I've only read - as an adult - Howl's Moving Castle, which goes to a couple of different places from the film (less war, more adolescent angst), nevertheless it won't be too much of a surprise if you've seen the film; and - as a child - Archer's Goon, which I thought was fantastic, inventive, sui generis, mind expanding.

Archers is Neil Gaiman’s “favourite kids book he read as an adult” apparently!

Finally nabbed a cheap used copy of the Tales of the Dying Earth omnibus - one that I've been looking for in bookshops for months. I'm gonna pause my other reading to finish this series.

I love his dialogue in these stories. Every character has pretty much the same crisp, grammatical meticulousness and understated hostility. It's a bit like Wodehouse actually.

Good comparison.

> and emily st john mandell's sea of tranquility.

uk Kindle daily deal today (but not kobo)

Definitely valid to compare Vance and Wodehouse. Vance also name checked James branch cabell but I haven’t been able to get into him.

I find some of the same ornamental joy in Rex Stout as well - at least when Nero Wolfe is talking.

And some of Joyce Cary and Waugh

There's also this constant vibe of: the sun is dying, there's no getting away, affairs have to go on but we might as well treat them as a lark.

For anyone who's interested in Michael Shea: his work has been steadily coming back in print, including another collection titled The Autopsy (to take advantage of the recent Del Toro/Netflix adaptation). There's a fourth Nifft novel (!!!) but I don't know how ready it is for publication, but some posthumous works have come out. I'm glad I grabbed the Nifft novels when they were affordable because they're very expensive and sought after now and it's still unknown what publisher is going to reprint them. His wife revealed that he also written an urban fantasy novel under the name Lynn Cesar.

might someone kindly explain/suggest cj cherryh to me?

started 'downbelow station' once but wasn't really into it for one reason or another. also it kind of seems like her book covers are extra-terrible

would also recommend susan cooper's dark is rising series

The Clientele agree

i just ordered Greenwitch from the library. Remember it as the trippiest of the series, like a fever dream.

— The Clientele (@theclientele) December 5, 2022

Greenwitch is fantastic, puts the teenage girl Susan right at the centre of the story, with an intense focus on symbolic, folkloric aspects of womanhood.

There isn't any clear consensus best book by Cherryh. Cyteen has a similarly strong reputation but it's a big one and some people tend to prefer something like Chanur or Faded Sun trilogy or Angel With A Sword. I've only read the first two Morgaine books and they're solid but probably not her best.

Alasdair Reynolds' Eversion: a bit of a change for him, and I think he was successful at what he was trying to do, but what he was trying to doesn't work as a 300 page novel. Essentially it's the same story told in five different ways so doesn't have any more depth or complexity than a 60 page short story. People on goodreads love it though.

I also read emily st john mandell's sea of tranquility, which was fine, idk, nice idea connecting ancient and modern sf ideas of time travel and simulation but overall, despite reaching for weighty themes, felt even more ephemeral than station eleven.

Micaiah Johnson's A Space Between Worlds is an effective multi-verse thriller: got me up every morning, 7-7:30, to read for an hour, with or w/o caffeine, producing a buzz/afterbuzz that lasted quite awhile. Characterization developing much more via action (and vice-versa) than by extended monologues of the taut, first person narration. Not "breezy," but moves along, with continuity and (also of) multi- and intra-verse shifts. Narrator Cara is "a walker of worlds," to quote one of her more appreciative observers, but also something of a dysfuntional detective, though whodunnit is mainly a bridge to whut now (manipulating factions, though less for the sake of a plague-on-all-your-houses/revenge than a gamble on rough justice)(She's from Ashtown.)

taut, first person, and pretty much *present-tense* narration, though with quick flashbacks/loops to clarify and remind of currently most relevant backstory elements.

(if no rough justice, then revenge would suffice.)

yeah i liked that one too

Today Fresh Air re-ran most of Terry Gross's good if brief 1993 Octavia Butler interview, incl. the author's reading from the then recently published Parable of the Sower, set in 2024, with some of it sounding more likely all the time, esp. since Trump's ascendancy (and now DeSantis competing from his right). It's preceded by John Powers' mixed review of the Kindred adaptation: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142768079/pioneering-writer-octavia-butler-on-writing-black-people-and-women-into-sci-fi
Here's the whole interview, about three minutes longer:
https://freshairarchive.org/segments/science-fiction-writer-octavia-butler

https://www.blackgate.com/2022/12/10/valancourt-books/
Granta too

Adrian Tchaikovsy's Shards of Earth. I dunno, has all the trappings of good modern space opera - inscrutable aliens, interplanetary politics, ftl via future physics space-time grappling, giant excession type planet destroying entities - it all seems so joyless though. I long for the playfulness of Iain M Banks.

any spiders?

i am lost with tchaikovsy, he seems to write faster than i can read

no spiders. the spider booked seemed a little more fun than this one - and the elder race novella definitely was.

booked